44 Vs. XLIV

A year ago, during the Inauguration of Barack Obama, Don Steinberg, a forty-eight-year-old freelance sportswriter in Philadelphia, wondered why Obama, as the forty-fourth President, hadn’t summoned up, as a guest or a symbol, the former home-run champion Hank Aaron, who during his playing days wore the number 44. Sports guys think like that: numbers, gestures, coincidences, comparisons. Steinberg soon realized that there was a football echo, too—that the 2010 Super Bowl, now less than a month away, would be the forty-fourth, or, rather, the XLIVth. This alignment, like the Rapture, will happen only once.

Over Thanksgiving, Steinberg decided to create a showdown in which each President goes up against his corresponding Super Bowl, in a SupraSuper battle for national supremacy or, at least, as a stimulus for oddball water-cooler conversation. (It can get a little old talking about just football, or just Presidents, or just dinosaurs versus robots.) He called his tournament the America Bowl, the idea being that, as he put it last week, “the Presidency and the Super Bowl are the two things that you grow up learning are the pinnacle of American achievement.” His teen-age son designed a logo, a generic football helmet going forehead to forehead at midfield with George Washington’s ponytailed twenty-five-cent profile: concussion imminent. On December 27th, forty-two days before the actual big game, Steinberg started chronicling his hypothetical big games, one per day, on his Web site, Americabowl.net. “Which have been better?” he wrote. “Our Super Bowl games? Or our Presidents? Finally we can find out!”

The criteria are vague. The Presidents are judged, for the most part, by their accomplishments, and the games by their competitiveness, with points on either side for iconicness. Many of the early Super Bowls were duds, no match for the Framers. The sole gem, Super Bowl III—the upset of the Colts by Joe Namath’s Jets—had the misfortune to line up against Thomas Jefferson, who, in Steinberg’s final tally, “wanted it more.” The kick is good: Presidents by three. By the time William Henry Harrison suited up, the margin had expanded to 7–1. His opponent, a Steelers defeat of the Vikings, in 1975, was a lousy entertainment (the score at halftime that year was a grim 2–0), but, as Steinberg remarks, “at least they played the whole thing,” whereas Harrison died after just a month in office. (“JaMarcus Russell’s holdout lasted longer.”) By Saturday, the score was 9–5. “Presidents got into a slump before the Civil War,” Steinberg said. Thanks for nothing, Franklin Pierce.

“The America Bowl pulls together all of my favorite ways of wasting time,” Steinberg, who majored in political science at Columbia and now writes mainly about boxing, went on. “I occasionally have weird ideas like this.” Years ago, he came up with a calculation to determine the age, in human years, of any car (basically, you divide the mileage by the model year), and a boxing statistic called the Tyson Index (the percentage of scheduled rounds a guy fights shows how “knockouty” he is). Last year, he drew up a bracket featuring Obama Administration Cabinet nominees and America’s favorite vegetables (the final pitted Hillary Clinton against the potato).

Some intriguing America Bowl matchups loom. For example, Teddy Roosevelt, who once threatened to ban football, on account of its violence (“That would have been a good move for the Presidents, strategically,” Steinberg said), draws the Redskins-Bills game of 1992. It’s not unthinkable that Nixon gets a win and Clinton a loss. Clinton’s opponent is the Giants’ upset, two years ago, of the Patriots—a Rushmore game, whatever one’s allegiance.

One thing you notice, as you peruse the matchups, is that this country has had to endure a parade of unexceptional chief executives and championship football games. The Super Bowl, few will disagree, is a bloated, overhyped spectacle, and, more often than not, an anticlimax; this may also be true of the Presidency. Presidents, like Super Bowls, are almost always overburdened with import and expectation. They both tend to under-deliver—a thought worth keeping in mind when, a few weeks hence, Obama gives his first official State of the Union address, as a warmup to the big game.

In fact, the America Bowl’s most difficult contest may be the final one, between 44 and XLIV. It’s hard enough to assess any Presidency, much less one that’s just a year old. As for the football, the playoffs, on the eve of the wild-card round, look wide open. (By the end of the weekend, a press-time prayer for Eagles-Jets will probably have already come to naught.) Steinberg said that he considered fixing the results of the America Bowl games leading up to this last one, so that it would be, as they say, meaningful—a possible tiebreaker—but forty-four is an even number, and, anyway, he is at heart more a sportsman than a historian or a political man. ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.